Bay Village receives $2,000 award to promote bicycling

View full sizeChris Speyer, chief operating officer of Accell North America, the parent company of Raleigh Bicycles, presents Bay Village Mayor Deborah Sutherland with a check and a Bike-to-School award. Originally, the check was to be for $1,000, but the company decided to double its donation to $2,000. BRUCE GEISELMAN/SUN NEWS

Bay Village recently received a $2,000 donation that it will use to promote bicycle riding in the city.

Raleigh Bicycles, one of the sponsors of the recent Bike to School Challenge, presented Bay Village with a donation May 24 at the conclusion of the challenge. The award to the city was in addition to a $500 award to Bay High School and a $1,000 award to Bay Middle School.

Raleigh and Century Cycles holds its annual bike riding campaign and awarded the money to promote bicycle riding, saying it benefits health and the environment.

“It was such a surprise,” Mayor Deborah Sutherland said about receiving the donation. “We didn’t expect it at all.”

Sutherland said she would talk with other city officials about how best to use the money. However, she had some ideas in mind.

“We have a couple of different options,” she said. “One could be a bike rack, but doing something fun as opposed to a basic bike rack.”

She talked about possibly installing a rack somewhere on city property that is designed to look like a sculpture, similar to one the Bay Village Green Team, the Village Bicycle Cooperative and the Bay Skate and Bike Park recently said they would donate for near the City Hall tennis courts.

Another option would be putting up signs around Bay Village designating a bike trail that would take riders from one end of the city to the other while avoiding major roads, Sutherland said. The city created and marked such a trail in the 1970s, but most of the signs have disappeared over the years and were not replaced.

“We’ve been talking about reinvigorating that,” Sutherland said. “We could use some of the money for signage or for painting the roadways so people know where the trail is, or for maps.”